Montse Alvarado becomes the first woman and first layperson to lead Vatican communications on November 1, 2026. What her appointment signals about Pope Leo XIV's media reform, and the apparatus she inherits.
Pope Francis served as the 266th Bishop of Rome from March 2013 until his death in April 2025. He was the first Pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit Pope, the first non-European Pope in a thousand years — and the first Pope to reset Vatican communications for the digital era.
In 2012, the Vatican backed the launch of a Catholic social network called Aleteia. Most institutional social networks launched that decade are now dead. Aleteia survived — and is now one of the most consistently cited Catholic publishers in the world.
